SIDE STREETS: Looking to quit smoking? You might be hip to hypnosis

FALL RIVER — Not to minimize Alan Alves' training or experience, but the man has a voice for hypnosis.

It's not a growl, but there’s plenty of burr in the lower registers. It'd be a good voice for the bass section of a very good choir.

And it’s relaxing. So relaxing.

On a cold Wednesday night, in front of a crowd of 25 that includes more than the average number of gum chewers, Alves is running a free smoking-cessation hypnosis session. They’ve screened off a section of the Bristol Community College cafeteria for him.

He’s a slim man with a short beard, and he’s wearing jeans and a baby blue fleece pullover with a zipper that runs a couple inches down from his neck.

Alves runs Southcoast Hypnosis Center, 126 President Ave., where he’s been trying to hypnotize people out of phobias, smoking, depression, addiction and other diseases of the mind and body for 15 years.

“I smoke a cigar every now and then,” he tells me. “On the golf course.”

It’s not a desperate-looking group waiting for the session to start, but they are a practical bunch.

“So this is free, right?” is the first question Alves gets from the crowd.

It is.

There’s a video first, explaining in 30 minutes that hypnotism isn’t the hokey watch-on-a-chain stuff you see in old movies, where the hypnotist has a forked beard and eyes that glow like hot coals.

It’s a hopeful group, a hope Alves tries to nurture.

“With a group session, you get a 20 to 25 percent success rate,” he says.

With the cheapest of cigarettes costing maybe $6.75 a pack, that’s very hopeful news for the pack-a-day smoker who is beginning to run out of options or cash or who has taken to making his own smokes with one of those little electric machines they sell in the discount tobacco stores.

If you attend a hypnotism event, even if you don’t want to quit smoking or lose weight, you do want to get hypnotized, if just for the feeling.

The feeling is a kind of heaviness as Alves tells you to get comfortable in your chair and put your feet flat on the floor. Alves provides a blizzard of relaxation, all of it in that sonorous voice.

He tells you to relax. He tells you to close your eyes, to feel the weight of your head on your shoulders, to feel your feet on the floor. He takes you to a tropical beach, paints simple pictures of white sand and blue water.

“Relax,” he says. “Let yourself go.”

And he gets down to the nub of the thing.

“I am a nonsmoker, and I will remain a nonsmoker for the rest of my life,” he says, speaking in a deep voice that rubs against the lower registers like a cat rubbing its head on your hand.

It’s impossible to get the full effect of hypnosis if you have to keep opening your eyes to take notes, but Alves' voice, listened to receptively and calmly, does lead you to some place of relaxation, some state much like those moments we all spend on the border between waking and sleeping.

Who is to say it can’t work? Alves sells it hard enough when he’s got you not under his control but, rather, just relaxed, pleasantly sleepy and comfortable, even in a folding chair.

Around the room, those who came to quit are in various poses, some sitting up pretty straight, a couple with heads tilted a little forward or way back, some slumped very low in their chairs.

And you walk outside and it seems colder than it was when you went in, the way it does when you wake up in the morning and go outside.